El Capitan issue- Search Function Not Working

bastles · October 30, 2015

I downloaded the El Capitan software update. All of my documents show up on Zotero no problem, but now, when I open my pdf journal articles, I can't search the pdf for words. It will only let me look up one letter. When I try to add more than one letter to create a word it says "No results found" even though I'll be staring at a word with that combination of letters. When I access the document through its original source and NOT through Zotero, it works fine. I'm using Preview on a 2012 Macbook Pro to open the sources through Zotero.

What's going on here? I talked to Apple support and they said that it has to be an issue with Zotero not being compatible with their update. Is this the case?

adamsmith · October 30, 2015

How about when you click on "Show File" in Zotero and then open the PDF in Preview. You wouldn't be opening it "through Zotero" anymore (not that that's really a thing in the first place). Same result?

adamsmith · October 30, 2015

actually, never mind--see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/38172/pdf-text-searchability-sometimes-lost/
this is an apple problem and it's a shame they don't even seem to know about it...

bastles · October 30, 2015

Christ... wish I never did that software update. This is going to make writing my thesis pretty hard.

Thanks for the response.

adamsmith · October 30, 2015

look at different PDF viewers. Acrobat is a bit bloaty, but really solid and has annotations in the free version, too, now.

bastles · October 30, 2015

Okay, will do. Thanks for the suggestion